digital music and the music business

Hackeroo: Bonnaroo Throws A Weekend Hackathon

There's one more week till Bonnaroo kicks off but the festival's holding a hackathon this weekend for apps featuring fan-generated content from the festival. The 24-hour hackathon takes place in Nashville with additional remote locations in New Orleans and New York.
And if you've seen the output from other music tech hackathons, you know some of the winners may well be working all week to be ready for real life.

Hackeroo is Bonnaroo's first hackathon in which web developers are encouraged to "come up with amazing ways to share the Bonnaroo experience using fan-generated festival content."

The event takes place June 8 and 9 in partnership with CODEMKRS, hackathon organizers based in New Orleans, and Aloompa, creators of the FestApp that I assume is again powering Bonnaroo's official app.

"The challenge is to create innovative uses for the fan-generated content at Bonnaroo and to memorialize and share the experience of Bonnaroo using the best of web and mobile technology."

The Grand Prize:

"Tickets & Backstage Passes for Bonnaroo with accommodations in the private Hackeroo campsite and exclusive artist meet and greet opportunities."

Additional prize packages will be awarded based on criteria shared at the start of the hackathon.

Teams retain ownership of the IP and apps are intended to supplement the official app.

While the competition is focused on what happens during Hackeroo, teams can build something new on top of a project that already exists.

Hackeroo encourages cross-platform HTML5 apps and will not be accepting native mobile apps. They also encourage mobile accessibility though taking spotty mobile access and limited Wi-Fi into account is probably a smart move.

Hacking to Continue During the Festival

While being able to bring in previous products on which to build might make things a bit easier for some teams to be ready for the actual festival, Travis Laurendine of CodeMkrs stated:

“They’ll get to meet a bunch of bands and basically use the app inside the festival and have their own mini office there...No one has ever had a hackathon team keep hacking inside the festival itself.”

"further enhance the festival's current applications and technology, including their YouTube application Bonnaroo 365, in order to create a year-around virtual experience fans can revisit even after the festival is over."

It will be interesting to see if something more long-term comes of Hackeroo. Most hackathons are more about the experience for the hackers, sometimes tied in to a bit of marketing for the host, after which the apps mostly seem to just get shelved like another weekend memory.